Octave PROJECTS                                          -*- text -*-
===============

Check with maintainers@octave.org for a possibly more current copy.
Also, if you start working steadily on a project, please let
maintainers@octave.org know.  We might have information that could
help you; we'd also like to send you the GNU coding standards.

This list is not exclusive -- there are many other things that might
be good projects, but it might instead be something we already have,
so check with maintainers@octave.org before you start.

---------
Numerical:
---------

  * Improve logm, and sqrtm.

  * Improve complex mapper functions.  See W. Kahan, ``Branch Cuts for
    Complex Elementary Functions, or Much Ado About Nothing's Sign
    Bit'' (in The State of the Art in Numerical Analysis, eds. Iserles
    and Powell, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1987) for explicit
    trigonometric formulae.

  * Make functions like gamma() return the right IEEE Inf or NaN
    values for extreme args or other undefined cases.

  * Handle complex values in fread and fwrite.

  * Support for lp_solve for linear programming problems.

  * Improve sqp.

  * Fix CollocWt to handle Laguerre polynomials.  Make it easy to
    extend it to other polynomial types.

  * Add optional arguments to colloc so that it's not restricted to
    Legendre polynomials.

  * Fix eig to also be able to solve the generalized eigenvalue
    problem, and to solve for eigenvalues and eigenvectors without
    performing a balancing step first.

  * Move rand, eye, xpow, xdiv, etc., functions to the matrix classes.

  * Use octave_allocator for memory management in Array classes once
    g++ supports static member templates.

  * When constructing NLConst (and other) objects, make sure that
    there are sufficient checks to ensure that the dimensions all
    conform.

  * Improve design of ODE, DAE, classes.

  * Extend meaning of .* to include v .* M or M .* v (where v is a
    column vector with the same number of rows as M) to scale rows of
    M by elements of v.  Similarly, if w is a row vector with as many
    columns as M, then either w .* M or M .* w scales the columns of
    M.

  * Make QR more memory efficient for large matrices when not all the
    columns of Q are required (apparently this is not handled by the
    lapack code yet).

  * Consider making the behavior of the / and \ operators for
    non-square systems compatible with Matlab.  Currently, they return
    the minimum norm solution from DGELSD, which behaves differently.

---------------
Sparse Matrices:
---------------

  * Improve QR factorization functions, using idea based on CSPARSE
    cs_dmsol.m 

  * Implement fourth argument to the sprand and sprandn, and addition
    arguments to sprandsym that the leading brand implements.

  * Sparse logical indexing in idx_vector class so that something like
    "a=sprandn(1e6,1e6,1e-6); a(a<1) = 0" won't cause a memory overflow.

  * Make spalloc(r,c,n) actually create an empty sparse with n non-zero 
    elements? This allows something like

    sm = spalloc (r,c,n)
    for j=1:c
      for i=1:r
        tmp = foo (i,j);
        if (tmp != 0.)
          sm (i,j) = tmp;
        endif
      endfor
    endfor

    actually make sense. Otherwise the above will cause massive amounts
    of memory reallocation.

    The fact is that this doesn't make sense in any case as the assign
    function makes another copy of the sparse matrix. So although spalloc
    might easily be made to have the correct behaviour, the first assign
    will cause the matrix to be resized !!! There seems to be no simple
    way to treat this but a complete rewrite of the sparse assignment
    functions...

  * Other missing Functions
      - symmmd      Superseded by symamd
      - colmmd      Superseded by colamd
      - treelayout
      - cholinc
      - bicg        Can this be taken from octave-forge?
      - bicgstab
      - cgs
      - gmres
      - lsqr
      - minres
      - qmr
      - symmlq 
      - spaugment

-------
Strings:
-------

  * Improve performance of string functions, particularly for
    searching and replacing.

  * Convert string functions to work on string arrays.

  * Make find work for strings.

  * Consider making octave_print_internal() print some sort of text
    representation for unprintable characters instead of sending them
    directly to the terminal.  (But don't do this for fprintf!)

  * Consider changing the default value of `string_fill_char' from SPC
    to NUL.

----------------
Other Data Types:
----------------

  * Template functions for mixed-type ops.

------------
Input/Output:
------------

  * Make fread and fwrite work for complex data.  Iostreams based
    versions of these functions would also be nice, and if you are
    working on them, it would be good to support other size
    specifications (integer*2, etc.).

  * Move some pr-output stuff to liboctave.

  * Make the cutoff point for changing to packed storage a
    user-preference variable with default value 8192.

  * Make it possible to load other image formats (ppm, pbm, etc. would
    probably be best since there are already filters to convert to
    these formats from others.)

  * Complain if there is not enough disk space available (I think
    there is simply not enough error checking in the code that handles
    writing data).

  * Make it possible to tie arbitrary input and output streams
    together, similar to the way iostreams can be tied together.

-----------
Interpreter:
-----------

  * Allow customization of the debug prompt.

  * For the keyboard function, parse return (or quit) more
    intelligently so that something like

      debug> x = 1; return

    will work as expected.

  * Handle multi-line input at the keyboard/debug prompt correctly.

  * Fix the parser so that

      if (expr) 'this is a string' end

    is parsed as IF expr STRING END.

  * Clean up functions in input.cc that handle user input (there
    currently seems to be some unnecessary duplication of code and it
    seems overly complex).

  * Consider allowing an arbitrary property list to be attached to any
    variable.  This could be a more general way to handle the help
    string that can currently be added with `document'.

  * Allow more command line options to be accessible as built-in
    variables (--echo-commands, etc.).

  * Make the interpreter run faster.

  * Allow arbitrary lower bounds for array indexing.

  * Improve performance of recursive function calls.

  * Improve the way ignore_function_time_stamp works to allow
    selecting by individual directories or functions.

  * Add a command-line option to tell Octave to just do syntax
    checking and not execute statements.

  * Clean up symtab and variable stuff.

  * Input stream class for parser files -- must manage buffers for
    flex and context for global variable settings.

  * make parser do more semantic checking, continue after errors when
    compiling functions, etc.

  * Make LEXICAL_ERROR have a value that is the error message for
    parse_error() to print?

  * Add a run-time alias mechanism that would allow things like

      alias fun function_with_a_very_long_name 

    so that `function_with_a_very_long_name' could be invoked as
    `fun'.

  * Allow local changes to variables to be written more compactly than
    is currently possible with unwind_protect.  For example,

      function f ()
	local prefer_column_vectors = something;
	...
      endfunction

    would be equivalent to

      function f ()
        save_prefer_column_vectors = prefer_column_vectors;
	unwind_protect
	  prefer_column_vectors = something;
	  ...
	unwind_protect_cleanup
	  prefer_column_vectors = save_prefer_column_vectors;
	end_unwind_protect
      endfunction

  * Fix all function files to check for bogus inputs (wrong number or
    types of input arguments, wrong number of output arguments).

  * Handle options for built-in functions more consistently.

  * Too much time is spent allocating and freeing memory.  What can be
    done to improve performance?

  * Error output from Fortran code is ugly.  Something should be done to
    make it look better.

  * It would be nice if output from the Fortran routines could be
    passed through the pager.

  * Attempt to recognize common subexpressions in the parser.

  * Consider making it possible to specify an empty matrix with a
    syntax like [](e1, e2).  Of course at least one of the expressions
    must be zero...

  * Is Matrix::fortran_vec() really necessary?

  * Add a command that works like bash's `builtin' command.

  * It would be nice to have an interactive debugger.

  * Rewrite whos and the symbol_record_info class.  Write a built-in
    function that gives all the basic information, then write who and
    whos as M-files.

  * On systems that support matherr(), make it possible for users to
    enable the printing of warning messages.

  * Make it possible to mark variables and functions as read-only.

  * Make it possible to write a function that gets a reference to a
    matrix in memory and change one or more elements without
    generating a second copy of the data.

  * Use nanosleep instead of usleep if it is available?  Apparently
    nanosleep is to be preferred over usleep on Solaris systems.

-------
History:
-------

  * Add an option to allow saving input from script files in the
    history list.

  * The history command should accept two numeric arguments to
    indicate a range of history entries to display, save or read.

  * Avoid writing the history file if the history list has not
    changed.

  * Avoid permission errors if the history file cannot be opened for
    writing.

  * Fix history problems -- core dump if multiple processes are
    writing to the same history file?

------------------------------
Configuration and Installation:
------------------------------

  * Add an --enable-pathsearch option to configure to make it possible
    to configure and run without kpathsea. 

  * Makefile changes:
      -- eliminate for loops
      -- define shell commands or eliminate them
      -- verify distclean
      -- consolidate targets

  * Make it possible to configure so that installed binaries and
    shared libraries are stripped.

  * Create a docs-only distribution?

------------------------------
Documentation and On-Line Help:
------------------------------

  * Document new features.
      -- history-search-{back,for}ward.
      -- Other stuff mentioned in the NEWS file.

  * Improve the Texinfo Documentation for the interpreter.  It would
    be useful to have lots more examples, to not have so many forward
    references, and to not have very many simple lists of functions.

  * The docs should mention something about efficiency and that using
    array operations is almost always a good idea for speed.

  * Texinfo documentation for the C++ classes.

  * Make index entries more consistent to improve behavior of `help -i'.

  * Make `help -i' try to find a whole word match first.

  * Clean up help stuff.

  * Demo files.

  * As the number of m-files with octave grows perhaps a 'Contents.m'
    file for each toolbox (directory) would be appropriate so one
    knows exactly what functions are in a toolbox with a quick look.
    It would be best to generate information for each function directly
    from the M-files, so that the information doesn't have to be
    duplicated, and will remain current if the M-files change.  It
    would also be best to do as much of this as possible in an M-file,
    though I wouldn't mind adding some basic support for listing the
    names of all the directories in the load path, and the names of all
    the M-files in a given directory if that is needed.

    Also make it possible to recursively search for Contents files:

      help dir        -- Contents from dir
      help dir//      -- Contents from dir and all its subdirectories
      help dir1/dir2  -- Contents from dir2 which is under dir1

-----
Tests:
-----

  * Improved set of tests:

      -- Tests for various functions.  Would be nice to have a test file
	 corresponding to every function.

      -- Tests for element by element operators:
	   +  -  .*  ./  .\  .^  |  &  <  <=  ==  >=  >  !=  ! 

      -- Tests for boolean operators:  &&  ||

      -- Tests for other operators:  *  /  \  '  .'

      -- Tests from bug reports.

      -- Tests for indexed assignment.  Need to consider the following:
	   o fortran-style indexing
	   o zero-one indexing
	   o assignment of empty matrix as well as values
	   o resizing

  * Tests for all internal functions.

-----------
Programming:
-----------

  * Better error messages for missing operators?

  * Eliminate duplicate enums in pt-exp.cc, pt-const.cc, and ov.cc.

  * Handle octave_print_internal() stuff at the liboctave level.  Then
    the octave_value classes could just call on the print() methods
    for the underlying classes.

  * As much as possible, eliminate explicit checks for the types of
    octave_value objects so that user-defined types will automatically
    do the right thing in more cases.

  * Only include config.h in files that actually need it, instead of
    including it in every .cc file.  Unfortunately, this might not be
    so easy to figure out.

  * GNU coding standards:

    -- Add a `Makefile' target to the Makefiles.
    -- Comments on #else and #endif preprocessor commands.
    -- Change error message format to match standards everywhere.

  * Eliminate more global variables.

  * Move procstream to liboctave.

  * Use references and classes in more places.

  * Share more code among the various *_options functions.

-------------
Miscellaneous:
-------------

  * Implement some functions for interprocess communication:  bind,
    accept, connect, gethostbyname, etc.

  * The installation process should also install octave.el.  This
    needs to detect the appropriate Emacs binary to use to
    byte-compile the .el file.  Following GNU Emacs philosophy,
    installation would be into $(prefix)/share/emacs/site-lisp by
    default, but it should be selectable.

  * The ability to transparently handle very large files:

    Juhana K Kouhia  wrote:

      If I have a one-dimensional signal data with the size 400
      Mbytes, then what are my choices to operate with it:

       * I have to split the data
       * Octave has a virtual memory on its own and I don't have to
         worry about the splitting.

      If I split the data, then my easily programmed processing
      programs will become hard to program.

      If possible, I would like to have the virtual memory system in
      Octave i.e. the all big files, the user see as one big array or
      such.  There could be several user selectable models to do the
      virtual memory depending on what kind of data the user have (1d,
      2d) and in what order they are processed (stream or random
      access).

    Perhaps this can be done entirely with a library of M-files.

  * An interface to gdb.

    Michael Smolsky  wrote:

      I was thinking about a tool, which could be very useful for me
      in my numerical simulation work. It is an interconnection
      between gdb and octave. We are often managing very large arrays
      of data in our fortran or c codes, which might be studied with
      the help of octave at the algorithm development stages. Assume
      you're coding, say, wave equation.  And want to debug the
      code. It would be great to pick some array from the memory of
      the code you're develloping, fft it and see the image as a
      log-log plot of the spectral density. I'm facing similar
      problems now.  To avoid high c-development cost, I develop in
      matlab/octave, and then rewrite into c. It might be so much
      easier, if I could off-load a c array right from the debugger
      into octave, study it, and, perhaps, change some [many] values
      with a convenient matlab/octave syntax, similar to
      a(:,50:250)=zeros(100,200), and then store it back into the
      memory of my c code.

  * Add a definition to lgrind so that it supports Octave.
    (See http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/support/lgrind/ for more
    information about lgrind.)

------
Always:
------

  * Squash bugs.

				--30--